Experience is not Required: Designing a Sailing Experience for Individuals with Tetraplegia

Conference

Ahmad Alsaleem, Ross Imburgia, Andrew Merryweather, Roger Altizer, Jeffrey Rosenbluth, Stephen K Trapp, Jason Wiese
Proceedings of the 2020 on Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS ’20), Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 2020

DOI: 10.1145/3357236.3395529

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APA Click to copy
Alsaleem, A., Imburgia, R., Merryweather, A., Altizer, R., Rosenbluth, J., Trapp, S. K., & Wiese, J. (2020). Experience is not Required: Designing a Sailing Experience for Individuals with Tetraplegia. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery. https://doi.org/10.1145/3357236.3395529

Chicago/Turabian Click to copy
Alsaleem, Ahmad, Ross Imburgia, Andrew Merryweather, Roger Altizer, Jeffrey Rosenbluth, Stephen K Trapp, and Jason Wiese. “Experience Is Not Required: Designing a Sailing Experience for Individuals with Tetraplegia.” Proceedings of the 2020 on Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS ’20). New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery, 2020.

MLA Click to copy
Alsaleem, Ahmad, et al. Experience Is Not Required: Designing a Sailing Experience for Individuals with Tetraplegia. Association for Computing Machinery, 2020, doi:10.1145/3357236.3395529.

BibTeX Click to copy

@conference{ahmad2020a,
  title = {Experience is not Required: Designing a Sailing Experience for Individuals with Tetraplegia},
  year = {2020},
  address = {New York, NY, USA},
  publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
  series = {Proceedings of the 2020 on Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS ’20)},
  doi = {10.1145/3357236.3395529},
  author = {Alsaleem, Ahmad and Imburgia, Ross and Merryweather, Andrew and Altizer, Roger and Rosenbluth, Jeffrey and Trapp, Stephen K and Wiese, Jason}
}

🏅 Best Paper Honorable Mention Award Winner

Sailing has a range of positive impacts on mental and physical health-related quality of life for individuals with tetraplegia. This work describes the iterative design process of creating an adaptive sailing experience that requires minimal training and preparation for individuals with tetraplegia. The Tetra-Sail is an adaptive sailing experience that uses a Shared-Control approach to accept input from both a main user and an experienced adaptive instructor (control partner). This approach was used to create a usable experience for individuals with all types of physical abilities, including participants with high level and complete spinal cord injuries characterized by loss of sensation and function below their site of injury, with minimal preliminary training. A study of nine participants (five first-time users of Tetra-Sail and four who had used previous iterations) suggested that participants found Tetra-Sail usable and enjoyable. Participants expressed feelings of empowerment, which they attributed to the flexible adaptation to their abilities supported by the implementation of Shared-Control.